KUNSTRAUM, Dusseldorf
23/07/2015 - 24/07/2015
for KLANGRAUM 2015
Collective readings of Story of O (Pauline Reage, 1954) in English and French, following a few simple instructions
“Sitting in our own little world our eyes wander between what we see what we know and what we seek, heart and mind hovering in-between. Some words speak to us more than others. We pick one, caress it with our breath, just enough to make it ours, our self-consciousness temporarily abolished by the vertigo of another’s language." (Reading (story of) O, page 10)
The infamous erotic novel has become a score for public collective readings. The Reading O instructions ask us to read silently with our eyes only looking for words containing O, the letter O, only voicing those that sounds exactly like O.
As readers we are collectively rewriting through reading O’s fate, in a language of O words and o sounds while having to manage or overcome the full effect of the erotic text on the senses.
first reading – 23/07/2015 – 48 mins (extract)
A first solo public reading took place in 2011 for POLIPply >10 – VOICINGS (4th may 2011)
Various reading experiments and abstractions of the story are gathered in Ode (owed) to O a double cd released by Edition Wandelweiser in June 2017. Does a story ever end?
Reading (Story of) O is available here
Ode to O
A body of work (book, cd, text scores, performances, prints) based upon the infamous erotic novel Story of O, in an attempt to navigate a passage through this difficult literary work and its notorious yet little known history.
The work began as a series of private love letters handwritten by Anne Cécile Desclos to her lover Jean Paulhan. It was first published in French in 1954, under the pen name Pauline Réage, and the official English translation appeared in 1965.